(NEW!) Bissell SpinWave Expert Robot VacMop

I bought the vacuum to clean the main level of our house. It does work, but not as expected. Our house, typical of houses built on hills does not lie on a North-South axis, but somewhat skewed to match the contour of the hill. My guess is that, although the manufacturer claims the robot is stabilized by gyroscopes, they actually make considerable use of an internal compass. If it were really a gyroscope it would tend to train itself against a solid surface like a wall and make long rows parallel to the wall. Instead, no matter where it is placed or in which direction, the robot tends to whirl around and take off on a diagonal. Better instructions on initial placement would certainly help, but I suspect that this odd feature may be unavoidable. "Bizzie Lizzy," as we call her keeps changing her course to run diagonally across the room instead of parallel to the walls. This makes for excessive wall- and furniture-bumping. She also loses track of where she has been and tends to get caught up in circles in complex rooms with irregular walls. On the other hand there was no problem with getting caught up in draperies or bed skirts. She seems to sense that something is there and makes no effort to fight with them. I watched closely to intervene, if necessary. In the dining room and kitchen she spent a lot of time repeating certain areas while pretty much ignoring other areas. Nevertheless she eventually got to most of it. She certainly did a better job than having your teenager do the vacuuming. I did remove the dining room chairs in the sake of efficiency, which only took a few minutes. I also found that it was better to close the draperies on the sliding glass doors because Bizzy Lizzie kept trying to climb into the track section and would get caught on a tilt (remember, she goes diagonally so she keeps doing the same thing on each trip across the room). I am assuming that I will gain more expertise in learning where I can initially place her so that she will do more broad sweeps first rather than spending a lot of time whirling around in pockets between the larger pieces of furniture. One big complaint I have is that she keeps losing her foam "ears" which help guide her around corners. These are not glued in place, just sort of snapped into a groove. They pop out frequently. Sometimes she runs over them and vacuums them up. I would like to see these more securely attached with some sort of clamp. Not too surprisingly, she does better in smaller rooms with less furniture. The bathrooms, kitchen and hallway were accomplished with ease--though I did find it useful to close the door in the middle of the hallway as she seemed a bit confused with trying to deal with a full 30 feet. A 15 foot section seemed easier. Again, it would be helpful if she did long runs parallel to the walls rather than bumping around with shorter diagonal sweeps. It was particularly useful to have Bizzy Lizzy clean in the pantry, where the dust bunnies tend to collect far back under the deep lower shelves, the robot is short enough to go under the bottom shelves, which can be very difficult to reach otherwise. At this point we do intend to keep her, and see if we can figure out how to overcome her oddities. On her initial cleaning runs she picked up lots of dirt and debris and left each of the rooms that I put her in looking nice. Given her habit of getting tangled up in the hollows between furniture and beeping for help, together with the need to confine her to one smaller space after another I can't imagine even trying to let her run without supervision. There is absolutely no way she could manage to clean several rooms while I am away. I can be in a nearby room doing something else, but the vacuuming would simply never finish if she didn't have someone to move her around. As far as returning to the space where she started, that didn't even happen in my 8 X 16 foot galley kitchen. However, it is still a whole lot easier than doing the vacuuming myself. Update: After trying to use Bizzy Lizzy over the Thanksgiving weekend she is going back. My sons were here and they experimented with me on placement to try to find a way to get her to actually do a whole room without being picked up and put in a new location to start over. Pretty much total fail. I wouldn't mind her wandering around a lot and overdoing some areas if she would just get the whole floor. At one point we left her in a bathroom for 30 minutes. When we opened the door the shred of toilet paper left slightly off the center of the room was still there. Two of four corners were untouched. Too much attention is required of Lizzie to be considered a time saver. Stars are reduced from 3 to 1 because the only thing I really care about is that the floor is eventually cleaned. Didn't happen